tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 23 07:28:29 1995

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Re: Relative clause ambiguity

Initially, I really liked this post because it cleared up
ambiguity in what I saw as a harmfully messy construction.
Still, it doesn't address the core of my original concern.

According to Nick Legend Nicholas:
> 
> charghwI' recently complained about the use of forms such as:
> DujDaq vIqIpbogh vIlegh,
> because they are ambiguous (between "I saw him in the ship that I hit", and
> "I saw the ship in which I hit him").

I guess I didn't make my point clear. My problem is not merely
that the result is ambiguous. My problem is that the pieces
don't fit well. When I see {DujDaq vIqIpbogh vIlegh}, I see a
relative clause with no head noun and I don't know what to do
with it.

The convention that is being broken here that I find difficult
to accept is that a single word is considered WITHOUT its
suffix for the clause and WITH the suffix for the larger
grammatical construction. We come close to that when we add
Type 5 noun suffixes to adjectival verbs, but not really
anywhere else that I can immediately bring to mind.

Basically, the information coming from the word order and from
the suffixes is at odds with one another. You read {DujDaq} and
you figure that's the locative for the main verb or a dependent
clause and then you read {vIqIpbogh} and wonder where the head
noun is. Worse yet, if the verb with {-bogh} had a third person
subject prefix, I would have to look at the NEXT word before
discovering that it did not succeed in acting as head noun
before looking back to {DujDaq} and rethinking its role,
stripping off the {-Daq} and reinterpreting it as a direct
object of {qIp} and its head noun, then reapply the {-Daq} and
using the whole relative clause as a locative for the main verb.

Doesn't anybody think that is strange? In general, left to
right (or beginning to end while spoken), Klingon does not
require two pass parsing, until this construction. One usually
does not have to rethink a word's role, sometimes with suffix
and sometimes without. If the word order is confusing, the
affixes help straighten things out, or if the affixes are
confusing, the word order helps straighten things out. Here,
the affixes create confusion and word order doesn't help until
several words later. 

Even with the adjectival verbs, you hear the noun first, then
see the adjectival applied to it, which in essence becomes a
suffix to the noun and the type 5 goes on naturally after it.

Each word in a good Klingon sentence gives you a hint as to
what kind of words might appropriately follow it. A noun with a
Type 5 suffix other than {-'e'} doesn't really set you up to
take a verb with {-bogh} attached to it. Until the SkyBox card,
I would have discarded the whole idea because it fundamentally
does not agree with the existing grammar. With the SkyBox card
example, it is now merely confusing. I want Okrand to explain
it.

> **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
> *    Nick Nicholas, Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Australia      *
>  [email protected] & [email protected]
> *    "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the       *
>   circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson, 
> * _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987.    *
> **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****

charghwI'
-- 

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